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Features

Stunning Color Touchscreen

Movies, magazines and children's books come alive on a 7" vibrant color touchscreen that delivers 16 million colors in high resolution. Kindle Fire uses IPS (in-plane switching) technology - similar technology to that used on the iPad - for an extra-wide viewing angle, perfect for sharing your screen with others.

Magazines in Rich Color

Enjoy your favorite magazines with glossy, full-color layouts, photographs and illustrations. Choose from hundreds of titles, such as Popular Mechanics, Marie Claire, and Better Homes and Gardens.
Special editions of titles like Vanity Fair, Wired, and GQ come with built-in video, audio and other interactive features.

Beautifully Simple and Easy to Use

Designed from the ground up, Kindle Fire's simple, intuitive interface puts the content you love at your fingertips - spin effortlessly through your recent titles and websites straight from the home screen. Whether you are in the mood to watch, read, listen, play or browse, you can get to all your favorite content with a single touch. It's that simple.

Movies and TV Shows

Thousands of movies and TV shows, including new releases and your favorite TV shows, are available to stream or download, purchase or rent - all just one tap away. Amazon Prime members enjoy unlimited, commercial-free streaming of tens of thousands of popular movies and TV episodes.

Fast Dual-Core Processor

Kindle Fire features a dual-core processor for fast, powerful performance. Stream music while browsing the web or read books while downloading videos.

Your Favorite Apps and Games

Thousands of the most popular apps, including Netflix, HBO GO, Hulu Plus, Pandora, ESPN ScoreCenter, Comics by comiXology and more, plus you'll get a great paid app for free every day. Enjoy the best games, including Words with Friends, Angry Birds, and Plants vs. Zombies, from top developers like Zynga, EA, Gameloft, PopCap, and Rovio. All apps are Amazon-tested on Kindle Fire for the best experience possible. Learn More

Web Browsing with Amazon Silk

Amazon Silk is a cloud-accelerated browser that uses a "split browser" architecture to leverage the computing speed and power of the Amazon Web Services cloud. Supports Adobe® Flash® Player. Learn why it's so fast.

Millions of Books

Read bestsellers, children's books, comic books, and cookbooks in vibrant color. The Kindle Store offers over 1 million books for $9.99 or less. Millions of free, public domain books are also available such as Pride and Prejudice. Learn More

Free Cloud Storage

Forget about memory - Kindle Fire gives you free storage for all your Amazon digital content in the Amazon Cloud. Your books, movies, music and apps are available instantly to stream or download for free, at a touch of your finger.

Your Favorite Children's Books

Kindle Fire is great for parents and kids. Stir your child's imagination with over 1000 beautifully-illustrated children's books, including favorites like Brown Bear, Curious George, and Circus Ship.

Stream your music library from Amazon Cloud Player or download to your device and listen offline. Looking for new music? Discover over 20 million songs in the Amazon MP3 Store.

Easy to hold in one hand

Designed to travel with you wherever you go. Small enough to fit in your purse and light enough to hold in just one hand, Kindle Fire is perfect for browsing, playing, reading and shopping on-the-go.

Kindle Owners' Lending Library

With Prime, Kindle owners can read all 7 Harry Potter books in 5 languages for free - as frequently as a book a month, with no due dates. Plus, choose from hundreds of thousands of books, including over 100 current and former New York Times best sellers. Learn More

Read Your Documents

Kindle makes it easy to take your documents with you. You can e-mail documents - including Word, PDF and more - directly to your Kindle so you can read them anytime, anywhere. You can also send documents to your Kindle using Send to Kindle, available for free download at www.amazon.com/sendtokindle.

Up to 8 hours of continuous reading or 7.5 hours of video playback, with wireless off. Battery life will vary based on wireless usage, such as web browsing and downloading content.

Charge Time

Fully charges in approximately 4 hours via included U.S. power adapter. Also supports charging from your computer via USB.

Wi-Fi Connectivity

Supports public and private Wi-Fi networks or hotspots that use 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n, or enterprise networks with support for WEP, WPA and WPA2 security using password authentication; does not support connecting to ad-hoc (or peer-to-peer) Wi-Fi networks.

Amazon Silk

Modern websites are complex. A typical web page requires 80 files served from 13 different domains. This takes a regular browser hundreds of round trips, and adds to page load times.

Amazon Silk is different in a radical new way. We've rebuilt the browser software to push pieces of the computation into the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. This lets Silk do more work, more quickly, and all at once. We call this "split browser" architecture. Silk browser software resides both on Kindle Fire and on the massive server fleet that comprises the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

Shorter Transit Times

Amazon EC2 is always connected to the backbone of the Internet where round-trip latency is shorter than what’s typical over wireless connections. Because AWS also has relationships with major internet service providers, and many top sites are hosted on EC2, many web requests will never leave the extended infrastructure of AWS, reducing transit times to only a few milliseconds.

Computing Power in the Cloud

Silk uses the power and speed of the EC2 server fleet to retrieve all of the components of a website simultaneously, and delivers them to Kindle Fire in a single, fast stream. Transferring computing-intensive tasks to EC2 helps to conserve your Kindle Fire battery life.

Page Indexes & Machine Learning

As Silk serves up millions of page views every day, it learns more about the sites and pages it renders, and by observing aggregate traffic patterns, it can infer where users might go next. For example, Silk might observe that 85 percent of visitors to a leading news site click on that site’s top headline. With that knowledge, the browser makes intelligent decisions about pre-pushing popular content to the Kindle Fire, making commonly-visited pages available even faster.

NEW — Reading View

Engaging online content is often surrounded by a host of related links, advertisements, and other competing material. With Reading View for Silk, content is elevated above the clutter. When Reading View is invoked, Silk loads the body of the page in a reading-optimized, single screen view – even for multi-page articles. The full page is still available in the background, allowing readers to easily toggle back to a traditional view to see other interesting features on the page.

UPDATE November 2012 - With the Kindle Fire HD out now, I highly recommend it over this older version, as it fixes many of the problems I mention in my review. No one should buy this original version of the Kindle Fire unless you can get it for very cheap. I would also recommend theKindle Fire HD 8.9" over the 7" Fire, as I feel the increased size has a dramatic effect on the tablet experience.

The first and most important thing that should be said about the Kindle Fire is that this is not an "iPad-killer." It is not designed to be. I have seen so many articles and comments comparing this to the iPad, and surveys where people are asked if they will be buying a Kindle Fire over an iPad this Christmas. If you are expecting an iPad, or even a tablet, you will be disappointed. The main purpose of this device is to deliver Amazon content to you more effectively. It is designed for consumption, not creation. That is the reason it is so cheap and why Amazon is taking a loss on it. They are hoping to make up for that loss through sales of videos, music, books, and apps through Amazon's Web Services. You can also use it to view your own movies and media, but will find that it is more limited in that way than a regular tablet. Personally, as someone who has ordered several rentals from Amazon Video, and had to contact customer support for every single one of them due to problems with Amazon's Unbox player or purchases not appearing in my downloads, I can really appreciate this. But if you don't plan on using Amazon at all to obtain your media, you may want to take this into consideration before purchasing the Fire. Additionally, the reason this product is so hyped, and one of the reasons I like it so much, is due to the ridiculously low price. Amazon reviews shouldn't focus on price, but it is hard not to with this device. On price alone, this is a five star device. However when looked at the Fire overall, and when compared with other touch devices (what little there is to compare it to), I have to give it four stars, since there are a few areas I feel could use definite improvement.

FORM FACTOR - The Kindle Fire feels almost the same in my hand as my 3rd generation Kindle but it is a bit heavier. It might be difficult to hold it one handed and read a book for an hour or watch a movie. You're going to need to rest it on something. The display is made of Gorilla Glass, which is a highly damage-resistant. You can still crack it, but I have used a phone with Gorilla Glass for two years on it and it has zero scratches on it despite being kept daily in my pocket with my keys. The back of the tablet is rubberized, so it won't slide around and won't get scratched easily. It also feels good in my hand. Despite all the companies that will be selling them, I do not think you need a screen protector. I have scratched Gorilla Glass before, but it is very difficult to do.

CONNECTIONS/STORAGE - On the bottom are a headphone port (which will accept external speakers), micro-USB (for charging and file transfer), and power button. The Fire doesn't come with an SD card slot, with good reason. As mentioned, Amazon wants you to get content directly from them. It also reduces the production costs. You can transfer your own content to the device through the USB connection from your home computer. The Fire comes with 8Gb of storage, which is enough to hold about 8 downloaded movies, 80 apps, 800 songs, or 6,000 books. I filled mine up right away so I never checked it out of the box, but apparently it is closer to 6.5Gb as the OS is going to take up some of this. You have to really become adept at managing your content through the Cloud. Books won't take up much room, but magazines are around 250Mb and movies are a little under 1 Gb. Free videos available through Amazon Prime cannot be downloaded, only streamed. So unless you buy a movie from Amazon or transfer one of your own, you must be connected through a wi-fi connection in order to watch your movie.

AMAZON CLOUD - If you have not tried out the Amazon Cloud Drive, you will be pleasantly surprised. You get 5Gb (which they will probably increase in the near future) of free online storage to store anything you want, and you can access it from anywhere. This combines very nicely with the Fire. 5Gb isn't much for my collection, so I upgraded to a higher plan (rates are $1 per extra gigabyte per year). I can upload a playlist to it and listen to it on my home computer, then when I get to work the Fire can access it and pick it up where I left off. Any songs you get from Amazon Mp3 are automatically stored on the Cloud and don't contribute to the 5Gb storage space.

E-READER - This was going to be the big determination in whether I should get a Fire or the new Kindle Touch. Ultimately I ended up getting both since I prefer the E-Ink technology to the backlit display of the Fire. If you are the type of person who reads a lot and expect to spend at least 50% of your use on reading books, I don't think you will be satisfied with the Fire over your Kindle 3 or the Kindle Touch, Wi-Fi, 6" E Ink Display - includes Special Offers & Sponsored Screensavers. It just isn't the same, and after hours of reading, the display would make my eyes hurt a bit (just like with any tablet). However it is nice not to have to use a lighted cover to see my books in the dark. The Kindle Fire is difficult to read in bright sunlight or on the beach. The touch navigation is very nice, but it doesn't function as nicely or quickly as it does on the iPad or even the Kindle Touch. This can be a problem for me, and the main reason I am using the Kindle Touch for reading books. Additionally, the Fire doesn't support real page numbers, even though the Touch does. So you have to use that ridiculous "location 121 of 16077 - 2%" format. A year of that with my last Kindle and I still don't understand what that means. They need to fix this in an update. Being able to touch a word and have it bring up the dictionary is incredibly convenient and takes less than 2 seconds. But still, the Kindle Touch handily beats the Fire for reading.

MAGAZINES - The Kindle Fire can also handle magazines, however the display is just too small to be an enjoyable reading experience. I tried out several different magazines, and the main problem I had was with the formatting. I tried to read an issue of Bon Appetit and my eyes were straining after three pages. There is no way to read a single article without zooming. The Fire handles magazines two ways: with Page View, which shows the original magazine display, and with Text View, which attempts to just provide the text of the article. A lot of magazines these days have several things going on in one page, with multiple columns, little sidebars and boxes everywhere, etc. I couldn't view a lot of this without zooming, the text is just too small. So Page View did not work very well for magazines like this. It is especially tough with magazines like Entertainment Weekly, Men's Health, GQ, etc. I found magazines like that unreadable on the 7" display. Magazines that focused mostly on the article, like Nature, Wired, etc, were handled much better. Some magazines even come integrated with embedded video and audio, which is a very nice feature, and one I can see being very useful for things like Men's Health, but I haven't had as much of a chance to use it yet. Text View is a very nice feature that works mostly well, but seems to get a bit confused with magazines that have complicated formatting, so it pretty much defeats the purpose since those are the ones I need it for the most.

COMIC READER - This is one of the main reasons I purchased the Fire. Amazon has a fairly extensive collection of comic books available for the Fire, including an exclusive deal with DC to publish many of their books. In addition to a proprietary comic reader that comes on the Fire, Amazon also has a Comics by ComiXology app available to purchase issues and subscriptions through. Although I initially thought the 7" display would be too small, it is actually decent enough to serve as a comic reader. I would definitely prefer a 10" version if they came out with one in the future. A 10" tablet is still the way to go for comics, but if you're looking for a cheaper option and portability, the Fire isn't too bad, and definitely beats a smart phone. It has a "panel by panel" feature that lets you scroll through the issue by different panels, which it will then zoom in on. You tap the panel when done, and it moves to the next panel. This is great for getting a larger view and working around the size restriction, especially since some of the text in the comics is just too small to read. Although it is fairly decent, if you are considering the Fire just for comic books, and you are a Marvel fan, you may want to hold off and look at another retailer's device which I think has a few more options. You can load your own .cbr comic files on the Kindle, but you'll need to use a third party app, like Comicat to do it.

AMAZON MP3/VIDEO - Amazon hopes that you will get the majority of your content from them. That is why the Fire is so reasonably-priced. Amazon music is DRM-free. DRM is copy protection. That means that the record labels haven't locked down the music you buy from Amazon to restrict how you use it. Amazon MP3 music is playable anywhere, even on your Apple devices. It also has a very high bitrate so you are getting great quality. You don't have to worry about not being able to listen to your music 15 years from now if Amazon goes under. It's yours forever. As far as video, I have always disliked Amazon's Video services. The prices are very reasonable and they now have a huge selection, but obtaining the videos is a huge pain due to Amazon's terrible Unbox player. That changes with the Fire, as everything is native and streams/downloads beautifully. If you make a lot of purchases with Amazon, or if you have several Amazon customers in your household, you should take advantage of their Prime program. In addition to the large selection of free videos now available to Prime members, the shipping advantages are amazing. I once had a 200 lb exercise bike overnighted to my house for only $3.99. Everything I order I get within 2 days. The Prime program seems expensive but it has certainly paid for itself over the years for me, and now is even better that it is integrated more with the Fire. The only problem I have with video playback is that everything I watched did not fully expand to the screen, and was letterboxed. Considering the small 7" display size, this was an annoyance for me. I know shows have different aspect ratios, but some should fit the display, and I think many users will be annoyed that they can't zoom or stretch the display to fit.

WEB BROWSING - This is another feature I was initially excited about. I like the idea of being able to use the Fire as a netbook. Amazon advertises "ultra fast web browsing" using Amazon's Silk browser. It is based off of technology that is designed to increase page loading times by pre-fetching part of the content. Sounds like a great idea, but doesn't work as well in practice. I tried out the Fire on several different connections and compared page loading times with other devices (all connected wirelessly). The Fire was one of the slowest. Amazon's own web page, which has actually recently been optimized to work with the Fire, takes an average of 7 seconds to load. Other major portals took a similar amount of time or slower. My iPad and my Xoom both load pages much faster. It is not slow enough to be a problem, but not fast enough to impress me or be worthy of Amazon's marketing regarding it. This needs to be improved. UPDATE - As of February 2012, page loading times are much improved. It can still be a bit slow and stutter at times, but you can increase this by following the steps at the bottom of this review. I am mostly satisfied with browsing now, although Silk still occasionally won't recognize it when I touch a link.

BATTERY LIFE - Amazon advertises 8 hours of reading or 7.5 hours of video playback. As an average, that's probably fairly accurate. During testing I got an average of 7.4 hours of continuous reading, and 7 hours of video playback over five tests for each. This is a big change over the roughly 30 days of continuous reading with the traditional kindle, so it may hamper you a bit if you're a voracious reader. I just got into the habit of charging it every night with my cell phone. You can shut down the Kindle or put it in sleep mode. I keep mine in sleep mode all the time because it is so efficient that it uses almost no battery. I can leave it in sleep mode for 2 days and come back and not notice any change in battery life, and since I don't have to reboot, it starts up immediately.

VS IPAD - As said, this isn't designed to be an iPad. I have an iPad and there is so much more I can do with it compared to the Kindle. The Fire serves a different (but sometimes similar) function. I just don't ever see Amazon building up the type of app store that Apple has, and that's where you're going to find the major differences. Additionally, the 10" display on the iPad makes a huge difference to me over the Fire's 7" display when it comes to watching movies and TV, and reading magazines and comic books. However, I think there is definitely room for the Fire to steal some of iPad's market share, as many people (I am one of them), will find the functions they want in a tablet can be covered by the Fire.

USER INTERFACE - The Fire uses a heavily modified version of Android. I really liked the interface, however I don't think it works as well on the Fire as it does on a full tablet device like the Motorola Xoom. Occasionally I would try to make a page turn and have it not register on the Fire, or have it register more slowly than I am used to. If you have a lot of experience with the iPad, you are going to notice that the software doesn't respond as quickly on the Fire as it does with other tablets. Although this is an inconvenience and something I definitely feel needs to be addressed, I can accept it given the lower price point. I will have a problem though if this is not resolved through a firmware upgrade in the future. The Fire's custom version of Android is very nice. The most recent applications or files accessed will display in a carousel format that you can rotate through. You can also set up commonly-used applications as favorites. If you want to access movies and pictures that you manually load onto the Fire, you have to open up the "Gallery" app, rather than accessing them from the "Videos" and "Photos" tabs. The gallery app does not very user-friendly at displaying these files. For instance, it just creates thumbnails for all your video files and doesn't let you view the file names when selecting a video. If you have dozens of videos from a single TV show, there is no easy way to organize them in the gallery. It's clear Amazon wants you to view their videos purchased from them rather than your own. I would really like to see them fix this through a simple firmware update but I doubt they will.

NEGATIVES:- No bluetooth and no HDMI. I could really use bluetooth for integration with bluetooth-capable speakers and so I can use bluetooth audio in my car. As a media player, I feel this really should have been included, and I imagine it will with future versions. This is especially important since the audio from the speakers is a bit tinny and weak. I have been using headphones with all my media-playing, which significantly improves the sound. There is also no physical volume button, which is a pain when you need to silence the device quickly (EDIT: You can sideload the "Volume Control" app by RubberBigPepper" from the Android Market for a great software workaround to this). I also would like HDMI output so I can take my Amazon video purchases and watch them on my TV. Another big disadvantage in a device that is made for media. This will also likely be included in a future edition, so at $200, I don't feel bad about possibly having to upgrade a year from now to get it.- Only 8Gb storage space. As mentioned, this device is mainly designed to integrate with Amazon's Cloud, so 8 should be enough, but it would be nice to have at least 16. I imagine Amazon did this on purpose to force people to use their Cloud service.- Touch capability can sometimes be sluggish. iPad and other tablet owners may be disappointed with the touch reaction time and some aspects of the software.- Video doesn't include option to zoom or stretch the display to fit the screen.- Very limited selection of apps from the Amazon App Store. Most of the apps are mediocre games. UPDATE - you can get around this by manually loading apps onto the Fire. Do a search for "sideload kindle fire." It is very easy.- Web "Accelerator" is not as fast as other tablets.- No Micro-USB transfer cable included with it. Another way for Amazon to discourage you from transferring your own files to the device. If you want to do that, you will need to purchase one separately, like the AmazonBasics USB Cable - 2.0 A Male to Micro B (6 Feet / 1.8 Meters).

SUMMARY: Bottom line, you will not find a cheaper device out there for streaming music, video, and books than the Kindle Fire. The reason that this device is so amazing is not for what it can do, but for what it can do at such a cheap price. The price tag, not the technology, is the story here. Although I definitely feel there is room for improvement and will be interested in seeing Amazon's second generation of this device (which I think will be significantly improved), the Kindle Fire is a solid start. If you can wait a year or more for Amazon to work out the kinks with the Fire (like it did with its 1st generation of the Kindle), you should definitely do that. The next version should fix a lot of the problems that keep the current Fire from being a "Five Star" product. Unfortunately, reviews shouldn't focus on price, so due to some issues with the form factor and touch interface, I can only give it four stars. It is just not "perfect" enough for me to say it is a five star product without taking price into consideration. But aside for that, there is really only one device you can compare the Fire to - The Nook. So for what it is, I would have no problems recommending the Fire to consumers who can take advantage of it. This product more than lives up to what it is DESIGNED to do. If you plan on getting most of your content from Amazon AND you have a Prime membership, I think you will really find this is a pretty incredible device for the money.

UPDATE 28 Dec 2011: After getting a new case for the Fire that makes it easier to hold, I'm starting to use it more for reading (although I still prefer my Kindle Touch for anything over about 45 minutes). Some magazines are now better adapted to the Fire liked my subscription to Wired, and some are still terrible and just compressed PDFs. An update released last week adds more privacy features so you can delete recent history form the carousel, and does improve noticeably on the touch sensitivity, although it can still be frustrating at times and not as smooth as something like an iPad. Browser loading times are still disappointing, but not as bad as they were at first release, and I don't notice them as much. I am continually impressed at battery usage for this device. Despite using it less than an hour a day, I never turn it off and only charge it a couple times a week. The rest of the time it sits in standby mode which is extremely efficient. If they could improve a couple more options I'd be closer to giving the Fire five stars.

UPDATE 7 Feb 2012: I have been able to update the browser significantly by doing the following: Open up the browser and select the menu button at the bottom, select the Settings button, and then change the following options:

Enable plug-ins: Change this to "off." This will disable Flash, so if you have any web sites that need it you can re-enable it (YouTube works fine).Accelerate page loading: Uncheck this. If your wifi connection is decent, it's not really necessary.Mobile (This one is optional, but I prefer to view everything in mobile mode rather than having Silk trying to force a desktop view on a 7" screen."Read more ›

I've had a chance to play with the Kindle Fire for a few hours now, and overall I think it is a great tool /toy when you factor in the cost of ownership and what you get. Compared to $500 minimum for the introductory price of the bottom of the line iPad2 (WiFi only), at $199 this is a great buy.

Using a Wifi connection at two different locations, the speed was pretty fast connecting to the Amazon server as well as to a couple of Internet sites. I had fast connectivity and display on Fox News, CNN, my personalized Yahoo page, and the website of the International Association of Penturners (hey, I do have hobbies!). I had slow connectivity at both Wifi locations with Google, ESPN, MSNBC, the Houston Chronicle, and the Weather Channel - I hope the unique app for ESPN and the Weather Channel are a lot faster, but I haven't loaded them onto the Fire yet. I will point out with the exception of the Google website, those other sites listed as slow are usually slow on my other handheld devices such as my Droid phone and my work iPad2 (yes, the Kindle guy owns and uses an iPad for work purposes). The web browser is called Silk, and it is nice and user-friendly.

Let's talk about what I see as the benefits first:

The screen size to me is just right for what I will be using it for - I have used an iPad and the screen is larger - but I did watch about 15 minutes of an episode of season 3 of 24 on the Fire and I didn't have screen envy or felt like I was missing anything. The sound quality was good, but I listened to it mainly with a set of headphones so I wouldn't wake my kids.

Concerning size of the overall unit - not too heavy or bulky and it fits nice in your hand. I have it in one of the Marware covers and it just "feels" right: that's not a firm statement for a review, I know, but what else can I say? Holding the iPad feels a little bulky at times but the Fire is just a little bit larger than my Kindle keypad, so I was pretty much conditioned to this size over the past few years. Compared to the iPad, the Fire doesn't generate near as much heat.

Speed of the apps as well as reading a book is VERY fast and responsive. I haven't tried a a challenging spreadsheet or Word document with the Open Office app yet, but then again I can't think of too many times where (based on my guesstimated usage) I will be doing those kind of tasks on my Fire: I like to keep my work separate from play. Maybe the time will come when business applications will become more prevalent with the Fire, but that's a story for another day.

Back to the pricing - $199 is an absolute steal for a unit with this many features. Compare that to an iPad2 at more than twice the price for a few more inches of screen space. Some people really want that, but it doesn't bother me. You will also receive a month free of Prime membership and I highly recommend you try out the benefits, which are more than free two-day shipping. You get full access to thousands of movies and tv shows for free. You can give them a test drive on your Fire and see if it is for you or not. I already rent a lot of movies to my Tivo via Amazon, and I can see the functionality of the free movies combined with the for rent options being able to be played on this device as very compelling for when I go on business trips.

And, for those of you I've been playing Words with Friends with, this morning's moves were made on the Fire - the touchscreen worked flawlessly.

I transferred some music to the Fire and it works like a charm. I haven't had enough time to really dive deep into this feature yet and come up with a playlist or jukebox list, but the sounds quality was nice: not too loud and not too soft.

Here are some potential negatives:

I don't think I will be reading too much on this device. Who knows, that opinion may change, but I REALLY like the Kindle for reading with its eInk screen. I read a lot outside or in bright light, and based upon my experiences with reading on an iPad the eInk is better than the full color for reading outside. However, my youngest child really likes the full color resolution as the books he likes to read has a lot of pictures in it (he's in elementary school). So, to each their own. I didn't purchase the Fire for reading, but more for entertainment.

As mentioned above, the screen is smaller than an iPad. That doesn't bother me (see comments above), but it may bother some people where size matters or they have to have the "biggest" of this and that.

I really wish they would have shipped this thing with a micro USB cord: if there is one in the packaging I missed it. Luckily, I have a few of them in the house, so I wasn't too put out. I imagine they did that to keep the overall cost at $199.

There are lots of apps available for the Fire because it uses the DROID platform, but Apple lovers will pound their chest and say "but we have over a million apps" blah blah blah. I think you should look at the QUALITY of the app vs. the quantity, as there is certainly a lot of junk in the iPad app store (as there is the DROID store), but your basic functionality for the apps I want / need are there.

Overall, at $199 this is an extremely great value to me and well worth it: Amazon has hit a home run with this one. If you haven't grabbed one now, get one before they run out before Christmas!

EDIT TO ADD:

Okay, I've tried to add this twice and it bombed, so hopefully the third time is the charm. Email setup was very easy - it took about a minute to setup my main Google account, and I was able to send a test message to another account as well as receive and reply to other emails. I sent a picture via email to the Fire and it showed crisp and clear.Read more ›

As a long-time Kindle fan I was eager to get my hands on a Fire. For the most part I've found that it does what I wanted it to, which is be the one device I can take with me anywhere. There are some great features; the reader app is excellent (though not without flaws), the app store experience is terrific, videos are fantastic, and the device is quick and for the most part dead-simple to use, all thanks to the services Amazon provides. And of course the extras that come with Prime membership really make it a real value - I won't be cancelling my Netflix streaming account just yet (watching Netflix on the Fire works very well) but I imagine within a year Amazon's free streaming video catalog will be just as good as Netflix. The free "lending library" book every month really is the icing on the cake though, and makes Prime membership a no-brainer. The hardware itself is solid and has a quality feel, it's just the right size for one-handed use, and the screen is fantastic (for an LCD screen) with good brightness and excellent color, and a very wide viewing angle. So as a reader, video player and music streaming device the Fire excels, and as an occasional browsing, emailing, game playing tablety thing it does pretty well.

But there are some downsides too; the small bezel size makes holding it without inadvertent page-turns difficult, the lack of buttons makes controls harder, the accessible storage memory is limited to just 5GB, which seems awfully small when carrying my own video content on a trip, and overall the interface of the system is just a little awkward and unfinished. Sometimes the back button doesn't work, buttons are hard to push accurately or launch the wrong function, navigation isn't exactly intuitive, etc. Particularly annoying are things like the way that almost half the screen is taken up by menu bars when browsing in landscape mode, the "momentum" of the browsing not stopping, menu bars that sometimes just pop up randomly while reading, and the navigation of Newsstand content like the New York Times is incredibly awkward. And then there's the jerkiness that happens when browsing or navigating other content; to me, this just shouldn't happen when reading a book. This is a Kindle, after all.

On the missing or unfinished side its disappointing that there isn't even a little bit of social media built in - no sharing clips of books or newsstand material via email, FB or twitter. Also missing is the "read out loud" found on other Kindles, and the new "X-Ray" feature found on the other new Kindles. There is no archiving or syncing personal documents - they have to be mailed individually to the Fire. And there's no page numbers in the books - c'mon, Amazon, this is even available for the old Kindles at this point. The browser lacks some basic functionality like being able to rearrange bookmarks, and other little annoyances. The email application is very basic, and doesn't always format text properly, and doesn't have simple things like a landscape mode to view a list of messages. But the biggest "unfinished" feature of the Fire is the Cloud integration; the Cloud doesn't work hand-in-glove with the Fire in the way you think it might. In order to access features like the video or the docs, you basically have to go through a browser the way you would from any other device. For the most part the Cloud acts only as a digital locker for items purchased from Amazon, not seamlessly as a repository for any kind of content you want to access from the Fire. The way the Cloud seems to be marketed, and the way it should work, is that the Fire and the Cloud should work seamlessly together for all kinds of content; if you upload your own movie from your PC to the Cloud, you should see it in your Video tab on the Fire, and be able to stream it or download it. If you upload folders of work documents to the Cloud, they should be available to browse and download from the Fire's Doc tab. But that's not the way it works. For whatever reason, the Fire's using a Frankenstein mix of the Cloud, Kindle digital library, the app store, and local storage to handle content needs. It just isn't quite ready for prime time, and it isn't what people are expecting when they pick up the Fire.

All of these little things add up to make what could be a great device merely adequate. Many will be able to overlook these problems and enjoy the Kindle Fire for what it is; an inexpensive all-in-one-entertainment device. I only point them out to remind people that they should not expect perfection from the Kindle Fire, at least not out of the box. Over the next few months it's possible (likely) that many of the problems I have could be fixed with software revisions - i.e. the bezel problem could be fixed by making the margins in the reader app non-active, for instance, and the problem with the menus taking up too much room could be fixed by making them accessible via swipe-up or swipe-down. Hopefully Amazon is already working on these things. Until then, I'm trying to learn to live with the Fire as best I can. Maybe I can learn to love it.

NOTE: This review has been edited slightly since it was originally posted for the purposes of clarity and to answer questions that have come up in the comments thread to this review. Please leave a comment if you need clarification or think that something has been missed.

UPDATE NOV 30: a recent software update seems to have fixed several of the above problems, specifically the system speed and page-turning speed are better, and the button response is much improved. Random menus no longer appear when reading, momentum in the browser doesn't seem to be a problem anymore, and the carousel is much easier to use as a result of it having slightly more "friction" in paging through the most recent items used.Read more ›